You said you had no power, (therefore no power bills) -- that implies no electrical appliances, since it was referring to no phone lines or Internet.
Correct, we had no electrical appliances.
If you had a generator or solar power and an electric washing machine, you could easily (?) have had Internet via satellite ISP, too.
Then you could have Amazon, e-mail, pizza delivery by drone, even Blue Apron for dinner, and a blender for smoothies!
So much for rustic cabin life.
Using Skype, you could then have a virtual telephone as well, without hard line hookups.
But you said "without phone lines or Internet" describes where you lived in North Queensland.
No electric appliances means no electric washing machine.
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My husband purchased a generator to help him build our home, but I never used it. It was purely for the stated purpose.
We had one small solar panel which allowed us to use 2 hours of power from one fluorescent light for about two hours at night.
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We knew nothing about Skype, Amazon, e-mail, pizza delivery by drone, even Blue Apron for dinner or internet; still know nothing about Blue Apron for dinner.
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We never had much delivered, I can assure you. My husband even made his own cement bricks. Yes, we had the cement delivered with some difficulty. As I said, we drove
through the river, not over it, so we were cut off for some time every wet season.
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One day we were amazed to see four men dressed to the nines approaching our home. They came to ask if we would like to have the phone connected. At first we said, No, thank you. But our neighbour had asked for it and if we joined in it would be more economical. We decided to get it. Telecom (I think it was at the time) had to bring the lines several kilometres and dig under the river bed. I think it cost us about $140 because we had previously been connected in NSW.
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In case you are wondering, our water came by water wheel which my husband had built by an engineer, and water was heated by running black polypipe above ground from a dam my husband built at the top of the hill.
So much for rustic cabin life.
Is that rustic enough? A friend is amazed that we were able to homeschool successfully without internet! Many people lack imagination, not to mention history and how the other half lives.